„Go with the flow“ – learning from natural material flows

material flows

When we think about Biomimetics, it is mostly a specific structure, system or working principle from nature, we are trying to learn from for technology. We observe an interesting plant shape, witness sophisticated movements of animals or explore complex chemical compositions. Today, I would like to suggest a different perspective to Biomimetics – taking a...
Continue reading...

Bionisphere: the Biomimetic House

The Master program „Bionik/Biomimetics in Energy Systems“ at Carinthia University of Applied Sciences (FH Kärnten) and „bionikum.austria“ have recently started a new project – »Bionisphere: the Biomimetic House«. The founding father of that idea is D. ID. Mag.art. Peter Piccottini, director of the mentioned study program.   It sounds like a futuristic project – but it’s...
Continue reading...

A Floating Turbine – Article Series Part I: The Flight of Albatross – Paper Overview

By The original uploader was Kils at German Wikipedia Later versions were uploaded by ArtMechanic at de.wikipedia. [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

Today I’d like to introduce my first Biomimetic project to you. It is about a floating turbine, which could be used to generate electrical energy while swimming in a river or other streams. I’ll follow my own pathway that I used several years ago, with the exception that some sources are now available for everyone....
Continue reading...

Self-cleaning surfaces

Who doesn’t know the famous lotus plant Nelumbo nucifera? If you type down the word „Biomimetics“ in Google pictures, you get this plant as one of the first results. It’s a typical example of biomimetic products because the self-cleaning façade colour (Lotusan© – video ) has been produced based on lotus‘ superhydrophobic surface. The largest...
Continue reading...

How to abstract a biological system to an easy experiment

Biology is quite a complex subject. Especially when you are trying to get deeper into a topic and understand how it is built up, functions and works, it can be very challenging and time-consuming to study a particular topic to its full extent. Still – behind every complex function there is a basic principle or...
Continue reading...